I like acronyms. They make me look smrt. Designing a board to mate with the Raspberry Pi is pretty straightforward. It’s mostly just a pass-through board. We need a footprint, though. As far as I know, there are no available PCBs out there that people have used the (nonstandard) Nintendo DS connectors on, so no… Read More: NDSL LCD FFC Design (OR: Working with an unknown TFT… »
At a place that I hang out on very rare occasions, there’s a big red button. When somebody holds it, it starts up an air raid siren that can get really loud. Unfortunately, it spins up very slowly, so people let off as soon as they figure out what the button does. That results in one… Read More: I like candy. Do you like candy? »
Recently, I got given an FPGA development kit to continue working on my SHA1 system. The end-goal is to eventually integrate that into a PCI-E card, but we’ll see how that works out. The FPGA kit I have is the Digilent Basys2, and it uses a Xilinx Spartan 3E chip. The lowest-tier, 100k gate model.… Read More: I need another dev kit »
Preface: This is a year-old post that I never published. I guess I was waiting to be able to snap some pictures, but that never happened. Most of these components have been e-wasted by now. — I’ve talked about various avenues of rapid prototyping circuit boards before, and not really come up with any definitive… Read More: Stop-gap PCB creation (has stopped) »
A few years ago, I designed and simulated a SHA1 encryption machine using CMOS logic. I actually built everything using Altera’s FPGA tools, Quartus. With standard propagation of the 7400 series, it worked out to about 1.8MHz max clock speed to prevent race conditions. Implementing the system right in VHDL and running it on… Read More: Further adventures of implementing SHA1 encryption on an FPGA »
There isn’t really any story behind this. I have a joystick module, and it would be pretty simple to hook it up to a motor and use it for a remote control car. I decided on a few parameters: No microcontroller. Where’s the challenge in that? Joystick wired directly to the car. Wireless… Read More: Vroooom »
A couple years ago, I started work on a timelapse camera module. I built one board, came up with some corrections, and designed a better version. Then it stagnated for quite a long time. A few months ago I checked over the files again and sent them off to a fab shop. After the new… Read More: Clearing out the backlog »
Side note: A summary of something I’ve been using for many hardware hacks in the past while. A lot of commercial machines use gears for transferring forces. Well, duh. It’s often necessary to change gearing around, though, and it’s nigh-impossible to find commercial solutions with appropriate ratios, tooth profiles, and mounting options. So usually I… Read More: Reverse engineering those finicky little nylon gears you find in… »
Like many (many many) engineering types, I have a goal of easy workbench PCB fabrication. I think I’ve done more research than most, however, and in this case, sharing the wealth means everybody wins. I’ve posted this up here in its original form, but an updated version will live at the VHS wiki so that… Read More: Rapid PCB Prototyping »
I prefer to do most of my laser-cutting purely in 2D. The open-source vector software Inkscape totally rocks my socks off, and I can design things about three times faster using that than anything else. When a design gets a little complicated, though, or it’s hard to see how everything fits together, it’s sometimes easier to… Read More: Actually »